Aral Balkan

EU-based businesses are required to obtain valid VAT numbers from VAT-registered entities.

Unfortunately, especially for e-commerce systems, there isn't a simple way to check the validity of a European VAT number. The European Commission provides a web site where you can validate VAT numbers by entering them in an HTML form. This is not practical, of course, for web applications.

Enter, the European VAT Number Validation API that I just hacked together on Google App Engine.

You can hit a URL like http://isvat.appspot.com/GB/802311782/ and get a true or a false back as a simple JSON boolean.

Check out the European VAT Number Validation API.

I hope you find it useful.

Comments

• Hi Erki, It's on purpose. I want people to be able to test out the API in the browser -- even non-techies. I don't think my accountant (whom I just sent the link to) would understand what to do with a JSON file download when she hits the site but she'll still be able to use it in the browser at the moment manually. When I get some time, I'll add a separate JSON endpoint -- this was something I threw together before breakfast this morning :).

  by Aral on 2008-07-04 16:27:00

• Hey Erki, OK, I just added JSONP support (pass ?callback=nameOfCallback) and I'm now returning application/javascript so that it currently fits my use-case too.

  by Aral on 2008-07-04 18:45:17

• Hello Aral, You probably know this as it's mentioned in the FAQ, but there is in fact an official SOAP web service provided by VIES (WSDL here: http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/vies/api/checkVatPort?wsdl). We are using it on one of our web applications to allow online registration of companies. I don't know if your own service is relying on it, or simply parsing the output of the "human-oriented" website. I personally agree that your solution, being REST-based, is more elegant, but people might prefer SOAP or feel more comfortable using an "official" service. In either case, I'm still trying to find a solution which allows applications to keep functioning even when the VIES site/service is down (which seems to be the case for the moment, at least for certain VAT numbers). One solution is to simply rely on syntax validation (check for example http://www.braemoor.co.uk/software/vat.shtml for a JS-based solution).

  by Nicolas Jacobeus on 2008-08-12 10:19:18

• oh that's very useful, thanks Aral!

  by Peter on 2008-07-04 10:47:16

• Nice API Aral. I was looking for something like this a couple of years back.

  by Farid Abdulhadi on 2008-07-10 09:31:39

• You shuld make it return application/json replies instead of text/html. See: $ curl -i http://isvat.appspot.com/GB/802311782/ HTTP/1.1 200 OK Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 Date: Fri, 04 Jul 2008 12:19:03 GMT Server: Google Frontend Content-Length: 4 true

  by Erki Esken on 2008-07-04 12:21:07

• Hi, and thanks for you code. As Nicolas said there is an official wsdl... Some php code to use it : $client = new SoapClient(null, array('location' => "http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/vies/api/checkVatPort?wsdl",'uri' => "http://test-uri/")); $params = array("countryCode" =>"FR","vatNumber"=>"00000000000"); $result=$client->__soapCall("checkVat", $params); var_dump($result);

  by MoksA on 2008-08-27 14:27:52

• Hi, Thank you MoksA for your example, it seems to works good. But what is the 'uri' parameter in your soap declaration ?

  by zmove on 2008-11-18 11:16:18

• I can't believe that the EU didn't think of doing this. First, the taxes, and then, hard-to-get-to information on the taxes :-) Thanks for this! R

  by Richard on 2009-12-16 17:28:11

• Hey! Great app! Could you also return the address and the name of the company using XML ? Something like: http://www.geoplugin.net/xml.gp Thanks again!:)

  by TheSpy on 2010-03-29 15:33:11

• Nice they have a webapi for it, but it seems down now :-(

  by Gerwin on 2010-03-15 09:53:07

• Great! Thank you!

  by Tim on 2010-06-30 11:04:47

• For anyone interested in checking a large number of VAT numbers without going to the trouble of developing an API you can go to www.gbrdirect and upload all the the numbers from a simple text file. The results will be emailed back to you. You can check thousands of numbers in seconds!

  by Rob L on 2010-07-25 11:48:03

• If you need to check a lot of VAT numbers in a small time, you should try on this site: http://www.gbrdirect.eu/ It can provide VAT numbers of thousands of companies in europe, in a few seconds... Hope it's helpful! Guillaume.

  by Guillaume on 2010-07-01 15:30:42

• Hey Aral This has always been a most useful service but today it seems to have gone down :( It doesn't appear to be a problem with European Commissions Service. Any ideas?

  by Paul on 2010-09-15 09:44:11

• Hi Aral, Why is that if I paste the link http://isvat.appspot.com/GB/802311782/ in IE 8 it is downloading a file rather then returning "True" or "false". It works perfectly fine with Firefox. by the way you have done a very cool job :-)

  by Rhia on 2010-08-24 08:37:34

• European VAT registration number

  by saravanan on 2011-05-20 09:02:44

• Thanks for sharing. Really Helped me lot !!

  by Pragnesh on 2011-06-07 10:10:25

• Hi! I just came across your post looking for a guaranteed API from the EU. Actually there is an API in form of a SOAP web service provided by the EU. The link to the WSDL file download is in the FAQ you reference on your project's website. This service has been available for many years already. Best regards, Peter

  by ph on 2011-07-12 23:53:31

• hi Aral, I am trying to get the API to work but cannot seem to get the data in the callback request. Can someone send me a code sample of how to do this in JS ? thank you kindly, Chris

  by Chris on 2011-09-07 19:37:03

• I found a website where you can verify several VAT numbers at once. For many it can be very helpful. direct link: http://vatnumber.info/en/vies_mass_vat_numbers_validation.html

  by Vies on 2011-10-31 07:53:44

• Here you can download a PHP script that I wrote which queries the VIES website. It was written for x-cart but can be included to any PHP code. You just need to call one function which will return if zero rating should be applied or not. It even emails or saves a copy of the VIES reply for archiving. http://forum.x-cart.com/showthread.php?t=62401

  by Angelos G. on 2012-01-21 01:20:44

• You sir, are a saviour!

  by Mark on 2012-04-25 14:40:03

• Cool tool. Why not use the second method, providing more than "valid" "non valid" answer, but also the name, address,... when known by the EU ? Could also be valuable.

  by Luc on 2012-07-10 07:17:11

• This doesn't seem to work for Spanish vat numbers at the moment (2012-09-06).

  by roger on 2012-09-06 13:56:23